On Friday in Signposts, my colleague Peter at Adaptive Path announced my new-but-mighty blog to the AP community. It was positioned as “the musings of a scarily synthetic thinker.” I’m either flattered or not. I choose to be flattered. Thanks, Peter!
Visit Peter at peterme.com.
[Note: earlier version of the post mentioned Dan, who has a nifty blog at odannyboy.com. But turns out Peter is the one to thank for outting my blog]
Hmmm. I’m in a quandary. I received a galley copy of The Cult of the Amateur from a friend who attended the TED conference, and my open mind is in question.
The book is a screed of Web 2.0 and the values it promotes (provokes?) including: participatory online culture, social networking, self-published contribution to bodies of knowledge, wiki-ism, and my two favorite ”ations”: democratization and amateurization.
I’m a firm believer that these social movements contribute to good. But author Andrew Keen’s philosophy is that these phenomenon are striking at the heart of our most valued cultural institutions — “robbing our artists, authors, journalists and musicians of their livelihood” and “turning truth into a commodity to be bought, sold, packaged and reinvented.”
So…to read or not to read?
I generally try to err on the side of reading a lot and being open to understanding the alternate point of view. When I did a deep dive into the web ring of pro-life web sites, I was both shocked and moved by the emotion and fervor of those who held beliefs so far from my own, and I did feel compassion and empathy for the stories I read. But rather than convince me, it strengthened my own resolve in my beliefs. I felt the rhetoric to be aggressive and fear-based, not open to personal choice and situational context.
Now I’m up against it again, and frankly, I wonder if I have the mental space to openly welcome the arguments against things I hold dear. And yet, if the unexamined life is not worth living, is the unquestioned philosophy not worth holding?
I don’t know. But, with a crowbar and a smile, I think I’ll dip into it a bit. Here’s my agreement:
Hand me a crowbar and stay tuned. I’m jumping in.
Original image on flickr, uploaded by kateruttr.Amanda has the most amazing bag. It’s one piece of felt with 2 zippers that run alongside the entire edge. When zipped, it makes this offkilter yet lithesomely symmetrical purse. When unzipped, it’s totally flat.
It’s called the Um Tote, and you can get it at Branch. There is a sibling bag called the Um Carry that uses the same design.
The designer is Josh Jakus, and his explorations of flat into form are inspiring.
You can get the Um Tote and the Um Carry at a lot of online shopping sites. I just wish I could afford one. Oh, and I also wish that I didn’t have a really annoying allergy to wool.
And then my flickr uploader reloaded the page and when I went back…poof. It was gone.
Damn it.
This came in from Indi…who knows the power of making reallyreally small atoms into bigbig ideas…
3D You
http://www.govtech.net/magazine/story.php?id=103598
(02/07) Vol. 20, No. 2, P. 26;
Researchers at Intel and Carnegie Mellon University are working to bridge the chasm between science fiction and science fact with the development of “dynamic physical renderings,” or 3D holograms that have texture, weight, and mass. The project took root with CMU computer scientists Todd Mowry and Seth Goldstein’s vision of remote, 3D representations of people that could be used for telepresence applications; these representations would be constructed from claytronics atoms (catoms). [note…no wikipedia page on catoms exists…if you know anything about these weird things, please start one.]
The research team is hoping to roll out a 3D fax machine in a few years that would capture and replicate any arbitrary, stationary object out of catoms that are 1 millimeter in diameter, according to Goldstein. The perfection of the technology would yield catoms so small that they could reproduce any texture precisely.
The project’s sponsors include CMU, Intel, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Science Foundation.
Well, no surprise that the folks following (and funding) this path of curiosity are an academic institution big on research, a public company with profits glistening in their shareholder’s eyes, the military complex with visions of virtual war dancing in their heads and the foundation that is chartered to keep American science alive.
But whomever is behind it, the technology sounds really, really cool.
I’m always compelled to insert my head into the towel loop.
Sometimes I wonder how these things get through the many twisty paths of approval.
It’s amazing what a night of conversation, craft and wine will do for you:
I simply, simply, love craft night.
The backstory is too long on this one. But for kicks, here is what I felt strongly enough about to write on my hand:
“So, you have a hot, smart woman that wants to engage with you emotionally, and you just can’t bring it…so stop peeing down your leg and get with the program.”
And yes, this was a direct quote. I wish I’d said it.
Mapping Cloud Atlas
Some books just have a visual structure to the flow. When I read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, the interwindings of the plotlines and the step-structure of the story arc were compelling. Compelling enough to claw at my brain until I could see it visually.
Hence the map.
[warning: larger image may contain spoilers]
Ryan introduced me to this lovely word. I don’t think the meaning was what I originally thought, but that’s fine. I kinda like mis-using terms anyway.
One of my sisters is mildly (and hilariously) psycho (I mean that in the nicest sense of the word) and is often in orbit. I may try this one out on her and see if she runs with it.
